


Prismatic

by Anonymous



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, As in talking in bed, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Pillow Talk, Scott Summers Deserves Happiness, Scott Summers POV, Telepath Emma Frost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 16:28:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30142362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Scott would like to discuss soulmates. Emma would really rather not.
Relationships: Emma Frost/Scott Summers
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: X-Men Rare Pairs 2021





	Prismatic

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [onestory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onestory/pseuds/onestory) in the [xmenrarepairs21](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/xmenrarepairs21) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Soulmate AU (any universe)
> 
> Loosely based in comicsverse, but there are no canon references beyond the Hellfire Club being a thing so feel free to picture it wherever you'd like.

"Oh darling," Emma tells him, bent over his face, breath mixing with his, "you're going to be a problem."

Scott wants to say that technically he's always been a problem for her. She was Hellfire - still is, just not Shaw's Hellfire - and he's always been an X-Man. You could go back lifetimes and he'd still be her problem; he can feel that in his bones. He doesn't let the words out of his mouth it yet her face twists in performative disgust anyway. Good. He knows when to shield his thoughts and it's not when he wants her to know that he realises how deep this goes for them.

It was supposed to be Jean. That was all he used to think, all Emma used to think, and Scott wonders with a twist of guilt just what that must have done to her. Diamond doesn't erode but with the right tools you can chip away at it. Emma is confidence itself, mesmerizingly so, and the moments her flaws catch the light destroy her.

Emma taps her fingers against his face. "Scott, dear," she says drily, "memory lane is all well and good for sentimentality but spare me the overwrought metaphors."

You know what a truly terrible system is? Soulmates bleeding colour into your world. Scott isn't blind, so he isn't as lost as he could be. No, he just had the unenviable experience of the whole world turning red right in the middle of a battle. Bright fiery red, blood red, red as screaming and red as the world. Never seen a colour in his life, living in grayscale the way everybody else does, and then out of nowhere he's different all over again. Separate. Other.

"Mine."

Scott smiles up at her. "You're awfully possessive about something that's a sure thing."

"Soulmates are for fairytales," Emma tells him loftily. " _We_ are hardly a fairytale, so indulge me."

Possibly his smile has just the edge of a smirk. She does that to him. "I'm yours."

"Obviously," she says, and kisses him.

Sometimes soulmates take time. Sometimes things aren’t right yet. Scott had read all the stories and he knew with every line that that was how he felt about Jean. It had to be. If he couldn't name the colors of her hair or her eyes, he just wasn't ready yet. After all, when his powers first came through, he hadn't been able to open his eyes at all. 'Red quartz' was as mythical and impossible as Greek fire. Maybe the colours had been burnt out of him. Maybe the optic blasts got in the way.

Maybe Jean wasn't his soulmate after all.

"Are you really going to think about Jean now?" Emma demands. "Darling. I love you very much, but if she turns up in our bed one more time - "

"Sorry," Scott says, because it is his fault. Then he explains, because she deserves to understand what she's hearing. "It always made sense to me, before."

"Did it now?" It would take a very special level of ignorance to miss Emma's tone, well beyond what even Scott's been accused of. Besides that, he knew it was coming. With Emma, it's not about sailing into the storm or battling a fire; it's about setting everything out and saying all of it, _feeling_ all of it. Jean and Scott's relationship had always been wordless, and maybe that had always been the problem.

"It made sense," Scott repeats, "so I never thought about it. All those things that didn't add up, and I ignored them because everything felt so obvious. I just got swept along in it." He doesn't particularly want to say it, until Emma arches an eyebrow and makes it clear he'll have to. "In her."

"Tiresome as always." Emma falls back onto the bed with a sigh, hand thrown over her eyes. "Has it occurred to you that perhaps I don't want to constantly discuss your childhood sweetheart, your first love, or your wife? Certainly not all three at once."

Carefully he takes her hand - not the one hiding her face, the one lying free. "Emma. I've been thinking about this. About us."

She snatches it back. "At least let me have my beauty sleep before tossing me away like a used tissue."

"I'm not tossing you away." Despite her displeasure, Scott can see her lips twitch at the sound of her phrase in his accent. "That's what I'm trying to say: I think about us all the time, in a way I'm not used to. And it's a good thing."

Slowly she drags the hand covering her face upwards, through her hair. It spills out across the pillow and he's grateful that she isn't diamond right now. She's stunning like that, of course she is, but staying like this means she's still willing to hear his thoughts. Scott wonders if he'd be so brave, if he could just turn off his hearing and hide away. Of course he'd like to think so, and that's precisely why he doesn't think he would. Emma's illusions about herself are all about the evil she sees inside, not the good.

"Spare me," she mutters. Scott pictures kissing her on the forehead and she groans.

"Emma, the more I think about it, the more we make sense. Every time we disagree, or have an argument, or don't fit in some way, I think it through, and I can see how it works. Any time I'm uncertain about something, I can just work it out. It isn't easy or instinctive and that's good."

Rolling her head to the side, Emma finally looks at him. Scott waits it out, the glare and the raised eyebrow together. He thinks about how good it is to be able to talk, to reason out loud. He thinks about how much it means to him to have someone truly listen. He thinks about how much he needs that, loves that: having someone who really will pick apart his ideas, rather than accepting them wholly out of kindness or squashing them with malice.

Heaving a deep sigh that makes her chest rise and fall with weary disdain, Emma says, "I loathe unnecessary poetics."

"Then it's a good thing that wasn't one." And Scott leans over to press their lips together, even as she accuses him of _graceless theatrics_ and the contact curves with their smiles.

Emma wears all white, he knows. She showed him that inside their heads. The first time he'd entered the worlds she'd built, he'd noticed all of the colors, the shades. Jean's mindscapes had been powerful but gray, always. When he'd mentioned it, Emma had stared at him in that strange psychic way, then told him that white hardly counts as a color.

He'd always assumed that the whole point was to stand out - chess was black and white and so were the sides of the Hellfire Club, and nobody would ever confuse them for something else. That's definitely a large part of why Emma loves it, he knows: distinctive whether you've met your other half or not. It's a shame, really, that he never gets to see it for himself.

"I could show you." Emma taps a finger against his forehead. "Unless you're deliberately forgetting something."

He catches her finger in his hand; presses a kiss against it. "Still wouldn't look the same as for everyone else." She doesn't immediately pull back, so Scott holds on a little longer before letting go. She shouldn't feel trapped, but he does want her to feel loved. "Even before everything went red, the visor still made the world gray.”

"Which is precisely why I could show you. Don't you dare to assume you know what I want to say." 

The slightest brush against his mind, soft as her hair, and then the image is there in his head. It's from someone else, he realises instantly, picking apart the telepathy on pure instinct. The image of Emma looks the same as the Emma before him, which means it couldn't possibly be a projection of her own self. No telepath can do that, not really. That said, the longer he looks at it, the more he realises it isn't a single memory. As Emma turns and glares and poses, there's no fixed angle, no single emotion or event. Before him, inside his head, stands the White Queen, presiding over an ostentatious gray-shaded background. Her costume practically glows, a fixed point amidst the washed-out scenery. Everything about her marks her out, drawing the eye in and closer. She looks magnificent, and utterly unattainable.

Scott isn't a telepath, but he has enough experience that some might class him as one. It lets him wave the image away like casting his hand through a smoke illusion. It's not like Emma's really trying, after all. "Very impressive."

"I am, aren't I?"

"One night, or longer?" Multiple perspectives are easy. With the way Hellfire prioritised the aesthetic to the point of insanity, it's much harder to tell whether all the images came from the same night.

"Does it really matter?" She raises an eyebrow at him, then sighs. "A few different men, who kept coming back to ogle me."

"Can't imagine why."

She blinks at him, starting to narrow her eyes. At the last second, she smirks. "Your sense of humor is as appalling as your grasp of sarcasm."

"Everyone sounds bad next to you." Scott rolls over, sinking into the mattress again. He likes eye contact when people let him have it, but he also likes being comfortable, which is just as rare. Looking up at the ceiling instead, he asks, "Would you have liked me to see you like that?"

Consciously or not, Emma raises herself up on her arm to lean over him instead, eyes relaxed with lashes not quite fluttering. "You can't blame me for wanting to stand out, darling."

Just like that, the affection is back. More than that: the confirmation of it. Scott's taken so many things on trust, hearing it out loud still makes his head spin a little. "You already do."

"Because of the colors."

"Because you're more than an appearance, and you know it." This time he's the one to reach out, touching the side of her face, next to her eyes. "Say I was fully blind. I wouldn't have a clue what you look like, but I'd still hear the way you talk."

Emma clicks her tongue, a sure sign things are getting far too emotional for her to be able to handle. "You can say 'argue'. Sugar coating turns my stomach."

"The arguing's part of it," Scott allows, a bit surprised by the laugh that mixes in with the words. "Emma, you look stunning and you know it. That's just not why I'm here, or why it's us that fit together."

Rolling her eyes, Emma says, "I told you that I despise fairytales. That's still true when the covers involve swooning against shirtless brainless men."

"I love you."

"Disgusting." 

Scott waits. Emma, her hair still a waterfall over the arm propping her head up, refuses to look at him.

"I love you."

"You said, you tiresome idiot."

Scott reaches out to touch her chin, without enough pressure to turn it unless she chooses to. Emma is all red to him - a purer red than anything else. "I love you."

"Is there anyway to stop you saying that? The inanity might just drive me to murder."

"You'd still wear white to the funeral."

The kiss would be surprising if he hadn't been goading her into just that. 

"I refuse to attend your funeral."

After a careful pause, Scott says, "I was expecting that sentence to carry on from there."

"Then you clearly know absolutely nothing about me. Some soulmate you are." 

He could say more, especially the next time she pulls away to let him breathe. When dealing with Emma, though, sometimes you have to let her have the last word. Especially when it involves exactly what you've always wanted her to say.

Scott knows they’re soulmates. So does she. It’s just nice to make things clear for once.


End file.
